Word: brilliants
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Meanwhile, Brilliant threw himself at the question of how exactly Cometa was going to make money. It wasn't 1999 anymore. The company had to be able to show skeptics a return on investment. Signs from abroad weren't good: in 2001, KT Telecom spent more than $14 million setting up 8,900 access points across South Korea. Two years on, only 123,000 out of a country of 45 million--most of them tech sophisticates--have signed up. (One reason is that South Korea's cell-phone data technology and service offerings are vastly superior to those...
...free networks with a strange hieroglyph--parentheses in reverse order--in chalk on the sidewalk for all to see. "The beauty of Wi-Fi is that it is so decentralized," says Anthony Townsend, an N.Y.U. professor who runs a network of 141 free access points called NYCwireless. Even Brilliant keeps his home Wi-Fi network open, and is happy for his Mill Valley, Calif., neighbors...
...Cometa was going to work, Brilliant knew, it had to think big. Despite the expense, it had to build 20,000 access points across America. These access points have to be as secure as Fort Knox and support Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs (think of a VPN as a solid, encrypted tunnel of data in the middle of any signal). Free Wi-Fi rapidly loses its appeal when you realize those home users could potentially take a peek at the data on your laptop as part of the bargain...
...Brilliant also insisted that Cometa had to make deals with corporations, not individual road warriors. "We need to sign them up 50,000 at a time," he says. If consumers use the service, it will be through potential partners like AOL Time Warner (parent of TIME) or EarthLink. Cometa would still be in charge of the infrastructure, but the Cometa brand would be invisible to Joe Public. Software developers would work directly with the providers to produce different flavors of Cometa...
...Brilliant's big thinking isn't enough to convince some skeptics. Seybold says it would take 72 people connecting to an access point every day for three years to recoup the cost of constructing it. And if each access point covers only a 300-ft. radius, that's going to leave a lot of urban America outside the Cometa canopy...